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Away Message

Away Message

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Every month at work I receive an inbox full of away messages courtesy of an e-newsletter my office sends out. While I typically think of these as an annoyance and delete them without a second glance, the last time I decided to read some.

I decided that there’s an art to the away message. Some are terse, no nonsense: I am away from the office until August 19.  I will answer emails when I return.

Others offer a ray of hope: I will be away until August 19 with limited access to email. “Limited” is not defined, of course. Does this mean a response later in the week? the day? the hour?  I’ve had all three experiences.

Many propose alternate forms of assistance: If you need immediate help, please contact … Often these substitutes are obvious ones, the colleagues anyone who’s in touch with you would already know. But listing them in the away message provides some coverage, some control.

The best away messages are the ones that already carry some of that devil-may-care vacation spirit. “I’m in Bora Bora till the cows come home. Deal with it, wage slave!”

These are the messages that can cause a contagion of sick days. They are not polite, not corporate. And they don’t end with “Thanks” or “Best” but with “Ciao” or “Later.”

The away message of my dreams.

Two for the Road, One at Home

Two for the Road, One at Home

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Yesterday I haunted the Air France website, checking first to see that Celia’s flight to Paris had arrived, then to see if her flight to Africa had taken off and, finally, to be sure that it had landed.

It did! She arrived in Cotonou, Benin, on Beninese Independence Day. Her big sister was waiting for her. What seemed preposterous two years ago — that I would have even one daughter in Africa — is now even more so. I have two!

Two girls on an adventure, two girls buzzing around on the backs of motorcycles (trying not to think about that part), two (girls) for the road.

Luckily, I also have a daughter who travels more conservatively, who even as a toddler would ask, “How we get home, Mama?” when we were on vacation.

We need both types: the micro and the macro. The ones on the road and the ones waiting for them back at home.

Vacations Past

Vacations Past

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It’s summer vacation season, and I’m remembering trips from the past. This photo is from the last big trip we all took together, four years ago now.

The scenery was magnificent. We drove down long valleys and past snow-topped mountains. We sampled once again from the riches of this continent, reminded ourselves how big the world is, how impossibly grand.

One of the times a family is most intensely a family is when all its members are crammed into a single vehicle. Sometimes too intensely a family. Which is why we haven’t taken another family vacation since then.

But the scenery, and the memories, remain.

Journey Without Maps

Journey Without Maps

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I just started reading a book by this title. It’s written by Graham Greene, whose work I usually enjoy, although not sure about this one. Still, you can’t beat the title.

In fact, the title itself has me thinking. “Journey without maps” sounds so exotic, so adventurous — traveling to a place beyond civilization, where rivers have not been charted, roads not cleared. How many places can we go now that are unexplored, mysterious, limitless in possibility? How many of those places would we want to visit?

Like many titles, this one doesn’t work anymore. Now we would call it “Journey Without A Phone.”

As the map — like the land line, the address book (heck, the book itself) — joins the slide rule and the 8-track player on the road to oblivion, we who remember and cherish these items are embarking on our own journey. And it, too, is a journey without maps.

One Year and Counting

One Year and Counting

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Suzanne left for Africa a year ago today. She packed a large bag and a small bag and slipped out by rail to Philadelpia. (“That was a very emotional goodbye for a trip from Washington to Philadelphia,” another passenger said as they were boarding the train.)

From Philly she went to New York, Belgium and Benin. For the last ten months she’s made her home in a small village on the edge of the Sahel. She teaches school, and this summer is working in a girls’ camp and at a health clinic. She is completely immersed in village life. She loves the people and they love her. She’s the happiest person I know. 

The months that led up to her departure crept by in slow motion, like time does on a roller coaster inching up that first hill. Now we’re on the downward slope. It hardly seems possible that Year One has passed. It now seems entirely possible to make it through Year Two.

Still, I seem to miss her more and more. Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays and, ten days ago, a graduation — all without her. The phone keeps us together, a family of the air, and that will have to do.  But now that she’s almost halfway done, I’m allowing myself to dream of a time when we’ll all be together again. Even being on the same continent will do.

The Grand Gesture

The Grand Gesture

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This is what, long
ago, made him fall in love with photography, the paying of attention, the
capturing of time. He had forgotten exactly this. … Pay attention, he thinks.
Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.
 Lauren Groff, Arcadia                                   
 It’s easy to pay attention to what is new. My flight yesterday was not new but newish. I hadn’t flown into National Airport in years. I had forgotten the landmarks, the way the plane barrels along the Potomac as it pours in from the west. 

There was National Cathedral, the Kennedy Center, the Capitol, the Washington Monument covered in scaffolding. There was Gravelly Point Park, the small jet swooping in so close I could see the dotted yellow lines on the bicycle path. And then, we had landed, and I was back on earth.
From the smooth purity of air travel to the jingle-jangle of ground transportation.

What I experienced from the plane was the paying of attention. But it was paying attention to the grand gesture. What I saw from the ground was the passing breath.
On Air

On Air

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Yesterday, a trip that usually takes eight and a half hours took an hour and a half. Instead of driving to Kentucky, I stepped on a plane, waited around a few minutes (OK, I’m not counting that, I was reading!) and in less time than it takes to watch a Disney movie (which is how we used to measure travel distances when the kids were young; one “Lion King,” one “Beauty and the Beast,” one “Hunchback of Notre Dame” and we’re there!) I was looking at my hometown from the air.

Among the cognoscenti (of which I obviously am not one), Lexington, Kentucky, is said to have one of the most beautiful aerial approaches anywhere. The old grandstands of Keeneland Racetrack, the  red-topped barns of Calumet Farm and the white-fenced green fields of the Bluegrass are the last things you see before the plane touches down.

But it wasn’t just the beauty that amazed me. It was being reminded of air travel’s time-stapling speed and the essential order of the landscape. Truths that have been hidden to me recently but which I caught a glimpse of again yesterday.

The Irish Season

The Irish Season

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The travel agents call it shoulder season. The New Englanders call it mud season. I call it Irish season. The time between winter and spring. A time when anything can happen. Snowfall or sunshine. Bloom or bust.

I’ve only been to Ireland once, but it feels like more often. Maybe I live vicariously through the travel of others. Or I listen to so much Irish music that I fool myself. Or I feel such an affinity for the landscape that I see it wherever I go.

Or maybe I visit there every year during the Irish season.


(County Clare channeled through the hills of West Virginia.)

The Trips of Others

The Trips of Others

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Word comes this morning of a brother’s travel plans. Electronic word.

This is the way the world works now. You forward itineraries, e-mail arrival and departure times. It’s easy to do and helps with logistics.

Sometimes when planning my own trips, I become anxious, apprehensive. Can I make that connection? Should I stay in that hotel? Can I afford this trip? (The answers, if I’m being truthful with myself, are no, no and no.)

There are none of these problems with the trips of others. One can savor a place from afar. This is the day they land in Dublin and from there they’ll drive to the Wicklow hills. Will it be raining? Will it be cold? It doesn’t matter!

It’s a good time to be an armchair traveler.

(This photo is from real, not virtual, travel.)

Words from One World

Words from One World

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After six months of phone conversations only I received my first real email communication from Suzanne this morning.

“I’m writing to you from the bustling metropolis of Kandi,” she began. And it must seem like a bustling metropolis to her, living in a village without electricity and running water. On the other hand, she intended irony. After all, she’s a child of the suburbs, grew up in the shadow of our nation’s capital, can maneuver a van around the Beltway at rush hour if need be.

Now, she travels on foot, bike, moto or bush taxi.

Seeing her message makes me want to drop everything, hop a jet to Cotonou and bush-taxi myself right up north to Kandi.

I won’t, of course. Not yet, anyway. This is her world now. I write about it only to remark on how the written word brings her new life to us in such a special, immediate way. Words winging their way from one world to another with the stroke of a key.